A handsome Romantic reinterpretation of Vignola’s classic Renaissance manual of perspective, Due regole della prospettiva pratica (1582, with many later editions).more...

Elements of Vignola’s diagrams are adapted for the oblong format of the book an often updated with figures and buildings in contemporary style. Bossi, about who we have been able to discover almost nothing beyond this manuscript, also adds a fine sequence of 4 coloured illustrations depicting furniture designs in the French Empire style by Percier and 17 superb monochrome views and interiors, 13 of which are in a sequence with their own decorative title-page ‘Aggiunta di alcune prospettive ricavae da classici autori’.see full details

This French adaptation of Machiavelli’s fable Belfagor arcidiavolo (’The Devil takes a Wife’) was probably the version used by La Fontaine for the version (Belphégor) he included in the last volume of his Fables (1693).more...

Le Fèvre’s version had first appeared in a very rare edition of 1661 (OCLC lists the Bn de France copy only) and this 1664 edition has Le Fèvre’s version of Plutarch’s Theseus added. The printer and place of publication has been deduced from copies in which it is bound with Le Fèvre’s Les poètes grecs (also 1664).

Classicist Tanneguy Le Fèvre had been inspector of the Imprimerie royale at the Louvre before his appointment as professor at the protestant Académie at Saumur. He courted controversy with several of his works, judged libertine by his contemporaries, notably his biography of Sappho, in which he desisted from censuring her sexuality..see full details

First edition of this work on the early history of the University of Pisa.more...

Though a little younger than the University of Bologna, the university at Pisa is one of the oldest in Europe, with origins in the city’s eleventh-century law school. Its importance to the early history of European law lay in part in its custody of the oldest surviving manuscript of Justinian’s Pandects, which it kept until it was taken by the Florentines at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Pisa attracted many lawyers in the eleventh century (prominent among them were Opitone and Sigerdo) while no less than four professors of the Bologna law school (Bulgarus, Burgundio, Uguccione, and Bandino) were educated there.

Borgo, who published a separate work on the Pandects manuscript the previous year (Dissertazione sopra l’istoria dei Codici pisani delle Pandette di Giustiniano imperatore, Lucca 1764), here traces the origins of the university as a law school long before Papal recognition was granted in the fourteenth century.

Borgo was born and educated at Pisa, graduating in law in 1726 and teaching Civil Law there from 1731. His life was devoted to the study of law and the early records of the city and university. .see full details

The limitation notice reads ‘This Edition is issued to Subscribers only and limited to two hundred and fifty copies, numbered and signed by the Author. The price will be doubled after first of March, 1931’. This copy is, however, unsigned and unnumbered. The work forms issue no. 5 of The Lugano Series.

‘From 1920 until 1937 Douglas was settled in Florence... As his fame grew, he became much visited by inter-war writers, and forged close friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher. During these years he lived with the publisher Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli, who helped him publish several limited editions, most of which were later commercially published in London... In 1937 Douglas was forced to flee Florence after the police made enquiries concerning his friendship with a ten-year-old local girl’ (Katherine Mullin in Oxford DNB)..see full details

First edition of these edited extracts from the Florentine chronicler Villani, with lives of Boccaccio, Bardi, Giotto, Paulus Geometrus (the mathematician and tutor to Boccaccio) and Cavalcanti, among others.more...

There are several accounts of Italian medical practitioners, including Taddeo, Torrigiano and Dino and Tommaso del Garbo. The Villani family were the leading contemporary chroniclers of fourteenth-century Florence and Filippo was responsible for extending the chronicles of his father and uncle, adding famous portraits of his contemporaries. Towards the end of his life he was appointed public reader of the Divine Comedy and he died in 1404. His chronicle remained in manuscript before being published by the Brescian historian Mazzuchelli in 1747 in this version which was several times reprinted..see full details

Marescalchi was born in Bologna, then in the Papal States, on 26 February 1754, into a noble family, he became a hereditary member of the Senate of that town. He later supported Napoleon in Italy and prospered under his patronage..see full details

Quinto Sectani was the pseudonym used by Sienese born poet and papal official Lodovico Sergardi.more...

His fourteen Latin satires mocked contemporary Roman society and, more particularly, the poet and jurist Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina. In 1690 Gravina was instrumental in creating the Accademia degli Arcadi, founded with the intention of reforming Italian poetry. Gravina’s writing was steeped in influences from the classical past, resulting from his researches into Roman law and history, which was an attitude quite in tune with his fellow Arcadians early attempts to return to classical perfection in poetry. The Academy, however, soon found itself reverting to fashionable baroque style, a tendency deplored by Gravina, who tried to suppress any such decadent backsliding. He alienated many of his former friends and colleagues and was the butt of frequent satires.

Despite the claim of the title page (‘nunc primum in lucem editae’) the Satyrae first appeated at Rome, with the same false imprint, in 1696 There seem to have been several early pirated editions, as might be expected for a scurrilous work, which accused Gravina of both pedantry and paedophilia (Susan Dixon, Between the real and the ideal: the Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome, 2006)..see full details

First edition of this celebrated illustrated account of Passeri’s collection of oil-lamps.more...

The collection was feted in its day as the best of its kind, but scholars have subsequently proved Passeri to have been the most gullible of collectors and that his collection consisted almost entirely of fakes. The work is thus a rather remarkable testimony to the unfortunate fervour of an eighteenth-century collector. The frontispiece in volume 1 is a portrait of the Archbishop Friderico Lantio de Ruvere, engraved by Carlo Gregori after Giuseppe Menabuoni; emblematic title vignette by Giovanni Battista Passeri, engraved by Vincenzo Franceschini. The plates and head- and tail-pieces, are engraved after Giuseppe Menabuoni, mainly by Vincenzo Franceschini..see full details

The text of this attractive Venetian Petrarch is that first assembled in 1525 by Alessandro Vellutello, the Lucchese editor best known for his 1544 illustrated Dante.more...

It opens with Vellutello’s account of Petrarch’s life, followed by the Sonetti e Canzoni, the Triomphi and the additional Rime, all with Vellutello’s copious marginal glosses. The printer who published at Venice under the imprint ‘al segno della speranza’ remains unknown. Books from this press usually bear the woodcut device depicting Hope, as here, and are almost always in pocket format.

In the early nineteenth-century the book was in the possession of Sir John Hope (1781-1853) of Pinkie, near Musselburgh, Mid Lothian, who served as MP for Edinburgh for 8 years..see full details

Considered to be the best play the author wrote in the traditional medium, a landmark in the history of the Italian theatre. The author was later the first Italian playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. .see full details